Turning Unused Acres Green

By JOHN LELAND

Published: April 29, 2012

CORRECTION APPENDED

THE city of New York owns thousands of slivers of unused land, and about a year ago, a group of Brooklyn gardeners had an idea: identify all the vacant lots in the borough, then help neighborhood residents take them over. They built an online map, then a mobile app, with information about the plots, including the names and phone numbers of the agencies that owned them. They called themselves 596 Acres, after the total area of unused public land in Brooklyn, according to city data.

On a recent Saturday, Paula Z. Segal, 34, a founder of the group, loaded up a bicycle trailer with handwritten wooden signs and set off for points on her interactive map, starting with 406 Nostrand Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a narrow ribbon that belongs to the Department of Housing Preservation and Development. Passersby stopped to watch Ms. Segal and a fellow volunteer, Eric Brelsford, hang signs on the chain-link fence.

''This lot is public land,'' read one of the signs. ''It's very likely that they would let you and your neighbors do something nice here -- maybe a farm or an outdoor movie theater.'' When a woman pushing a shopping cart said she might call the agency's phone number, Ms. Segal gently steered her in another direction.

''Calling the number is an O.K. place to start,'' she said. ''It's better to talk to your neighbors and see what they want to do here.''

Ms. Segal has a history of contesting the lines between public and private space. In 2005, she and two friends docked an abandoned Navy rescue boat in the Gowanus Canal, converting the 63-foot ship into an open space for art, politics and hanging out. Amid complaints from neighbors, they were eventually evicted -- in part, Ms. Segal said, because of an article in The New York Times. Earlier this year, as a law clerk at the firm Rankin & Taylor, she helped lead a successful campaign to reopen Zuccotti Park, which city officials had fenced off after evicting the Occupy Wall Street protesters. Afterward, she told The Village Voice, ''I work to take fences down,'' adding, ''That's mostly what I do.''

Born Paula Zaslavsky, she adopted the surname Segal in 2008, from her maternal grandfather, the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust and the last to carry the Segal name, she said.

The idea for 596 Acres grew out of a long and still ongoing effort to convert a city-owned site in Clinton Hill into a park. In the course of organizing, Ms. Segal became interested in a city database of publicly owned vacant properties, which she felt could be useful for community groups. The raw data showed close to 2,000 lots in Brooklyn. Working with researchers at the Center for the Study of Brooklyn at Brooklyn College, Ms. Segal and her colleagues first eliminated lots that already had community gardens or plans for use, and parcels that were inaccessible from the street. They came up with a map of 1,044 properties, covering about 250 to 300 acres, mostly in low-income areas with little green space, said Mr. Brelsford, 29, a freelance computer programmer. With a $324 grant from the online fund-raising platform In Our Back Yard, which works like Kickstarter for green projects, they printed 1,000 maps and began handing them out or posting them on vacant lots. They put the map online last August. E-mail messages started to come in, hundreds of them, from people who said they wanted to help or be helped.

Tami Johnson had been trying for two years to create a community garden near her home in Gowanus when she came across 596 Acres.

''My whole neighborhood is totally full of holes,'' said Ms. Johnson, 37, who tests video games and plays drums in several bands. ''Developers came in, the economy crashed, projects stopped, and they left holes all over the neighborhood. And there are all these other lots that are trash pits.''

Ms. Johnson had tried to convert two lots, but had been unsuccessful. Through the 596 Acres Web site, she found a lot on Bergen Street, and the name of another gardener, Tom Hallaran, who was also interested in converting part of it to grow produce. Mr. Hallaran, in turn, had been attracted to the lot -- long a neighborhood eyesore -- by a sign posted by Ms. Segal on the fence around it. Last summer, Ms. Johnson began lobbying city agencies for the land, this time with better results. By March, volunteers had cleared off 30 to 40 trash bags of debris.

On a cold Tuesday afternoon earlier this month, Mr. Hallaran and three other volunteers tended to tomato seedlings at what they are now calling Feedback Farms, which shares the Bergen Street lot with a traditional community garden and the Textile Arts Center, which grows plants for botanical textile dyes.

Feedback Farms is an experiment in movable urban gardening. Because the soil was considered contaminated, all the gardening is done in containers. And to get the land, Ms. Johnson stressed that the garden was temporary, and the city or a private owner could reclaim it at any time. So Mr. Hallaran, working with other volunteers, designed a vegetable garden that could be moved on short notice, using forklift pallets. In Our Back Yard provided a grant of $4,484 for the garden.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: An article in some editions last Sunday about a group of Brooklyn gardeners who identify vacant lots in the borough and help neighborhood residents take them over misstated the number of unused lots in Brooklyn controlled by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development that it has made available to gardeners. Of the department's 673 lots, 20 are being used for temporary gardens, and it has also transferred 39 other lots to the Parks Department as more permanent gardens; it has not made 141 lots available, either temporarily or permanently.